Christian I, also spelled Christiern (born 1426—died May 21, 1481, Copenhagen, Den.), king of Denmark (1448–81), Norway (1450–81), and Sweden (1457–64, 1465–67), and founder of the Oldenburg dynasty, which ruled Denmark until 1863. He tried to gain control over Sweden and maintain a union of the Scandinavian nations but was defeated by rebellious Swedish nobles (1471).

The son of Count Dietrich the Happy of Oldenburg and Hedvig of Holstein, Christian was elected to succeed Christopher III, king of Denmark and Norway, by the Danish Rigsråd (state council) in 1448. The following year he married his predecessor’s widow, Queen Dorothea of Hohenzollern. The decision of a meeting of the Danish and Swedish councils at Halmstad, Swed. (1450), recognizing Christian as king of Norway and heir in Sweden was disputed by the Swedish king Charles VIII, touching off a Danish-Swedish war (1451–57). After Charles was finally deposed in 1457, Christian held the Swedish throne until 1464, when he was overthrown by a group of the higher Swedish nobility. He held the throne again in 1465–67. His last full-scale attempt to gain sovereignty over Sweden was ended by his defeat at Brunkeberg, near Stockholm (1471), by forces led by the Swedish nobleman Sten Sture the Elder.

Christian gained control over both Schleswig (now split between Denmark and Germany) and Holstein (now in Germany) in 1460, at the time that the Schleswig ducal line died out. He offset the growing opposition of the Danish nobility by calling a meeting of the Danish estates (1468), a precedent followed by his immediate successors. Financially weak because of his wars against Sweden and land purchases in Schleswig and Holstein, Christian became dependent on the Hanseatic League, a north German trading confederation, and granted the league generous commercial privileges. He was drawn into a war with England (1469–74) when the Hanseatic traders challenged English trading rights in Iceland.

In 1469, when Christian’s daughter Margaret was married to James III, king of Scotland, the Norwegian-controlled Orkney and Shetland islands were mortgaged to Scotland to help pay for Margaret’s dowry, and the annual rent Scotland paid for the Hebrides Islands and the Isle of Man was cancelled. Christian concluded a concordat with Pope Sixtus IV, improving his relations with the Danish Church. After visiting Rome (1474) he obtained a papal bull (1475) for a university, which he founded at Copenhagen in 1479.

Learn More in these related articles:

...Christopher. He died in 1448 without heirs, and Charles Knutsson was elected king of Sweden as Charles VIII of Sweden. It was hoped that he would be accepted as the union king, but the Danes elected Christian of Oldenburg. The Norwegians chose Charles as king, but a meeting of the Danish and Swedish councils in 1450 agreed to give up Charles’s claims on Norway, while the councils agreed that the...

...realm and in 1442 by Norway. The joint crown was offered to Erik’s nephew Christopher III, but his reign did little to strengthen the union, which was temporarily dissolved after his death in 1448. Christian I, founder of the Oldenburg dynasty, succeeded to the Danish and Norwegian thrones, but efforts to bring Sweden back into the union were only intermittently successful, and when Christian...

After the accession of Christian I of Oldenburg in 1450, Norwegian government was again centred in Copenhagen. The lower estates were also essentially powerless against the Danes, and isolated peasant uprisings had neither good leadership nor clear political goals. In 1448 Norway had accepted the Swedish candidate for king, Karl Knutsson, but was forced to acknowledge Christian I and to remain...